Laravel & Lumen: Return Correct Error Responses for Requests

I’ve seen a few pieces of API code dotted around the web recently where people have written simple JSON APIs but their error handling still returns HTML instead of JSON for 404 errors and the likes. This is pretty simple to solve with Laravel or Lumen and easily testable too. The cleanest way I’ve seen of handling this was written by Paul Redmond in his book ‘Writing APIs with Lumen’ which you can purchase on Leanpub.

March 03, 2016

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I’ve seen a few pieces of API code dotted around the web recently where people have written simple JSON APIs but their error handling still returns HTML instead of JSON for 404 errors and the likes. This is pretty simple to solve with Laravel or Lumen and easily testable too. The cleanest way I’ve seen of handling this was written by Paul Redmond in his book ‘Writing APIs with Lumen’ which you can purchase on Leanpub.

In your error handler, typically located at app/Exceptions/Handler.php, you’ll need to add a check for wantsJson() on the Request object, like this: